ntoll.org

(Everything I say is false...)

Taking the Long Term View

Thursday 28th March 2013 (8:00AM)

The British Museum is one of my
favourite places because it forces me to take on a perspective of 5000 years
or more. Take the
Mesopotamian clay tablet
shown below: it records the allocation of beer by administrators in the city
of Uruk. The symbol
representing beer is apparently an upright jar with a pointed base, amounts
are notated by circles and semi-circles and, at the bottom left, there is a
figure drinking from a bowl.

It's about 5100 years old. Now, pause for a moment to consider its age.

The difference in time between today and the era of
Julius Caesar and
Cleopatra
is 1000 years less than the period between the creation of the Mesopotamian
tablet and the era of Caesar and Cleopatra. Put simply, Caesar and Cleopatra
are closer in time to us (by 1000 years) than they are to the Mesopotamian
scribe who recorded the allocation of beer to citizens of Uruk.

It is intriguing that the tablet is political in nature, an instance
of a new technology and of economic interest. Not only is it evidence of the
machinations of the state in Uruk but it demonstrates how a new technology
(writing) changed the capabilities of such a state: for the first time it was
possible to keep records and thus run a bureaucracy on a large scale.
Furthermore, it records receipt of payment requiring concepts such as balance,
debt and a measure of value (in beer).

Such concepts (writing, state bureaucracy and fundamental economics) are
unremarkable in today's world, making it difficult for us to appreciate how
important, strange or unusual they must have seemed when they first appeared. I
wonder what important, strange or unusual aspects of our time will be
unremarkable to our descendants. Furthermore, what aspects of our lives that
seem fixed today will be completely different 5000 years hence?

Despite this code being more than 50 years old, it is still understandable
to anyone who has read my
recent Lisp article. Furthermore
it forces me to wonder what the computational world will be like in 5000 years.
I hope the world wide web
will be long gone and replaced with something much more capable and better
engineered and I guess that new computer architectures will arise to replace
the
Von Neumann
/ Harvard
based models in current use.

Perhaps the final word should be another Alan Kay quote:

"I believe that the only kind of science computing can be is like
the science of bridge building. Somebody has to build the bridges and other
people have to tear them down and make better theories, and you have to keep
on building bridges."